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Seattle Seahawks' 12th Man: A Game Advantage Unmatched In The Business World

When the Seattle Seahawks take the field on Thursday night for the Kickoff of the 2014 NFL season, they face the Green Bay Packers with a distinct advantage—An advantage that the Packers can’t duplicate or take for their own.

An advantage they call: The 12th Man.

Growing up in the Seattle area, I loved watching the Seahawks: I would scream at the TV, jumping up and down with excitement. My favorite memory being Efren Herrera faking a field goal, then catching a touchdown pass in the end zone when the opposing team failed to cover the 5’9 kicker.

In reality, all my screaming, yelling and jumping up and down had little impact on the game itself. There are enough superstitious fans out there that disagree, but little data to prove it.

But Seattle’s 12th Man is now as much a part of the team as the players on the field. The team knows it, the fans know it, and the visiting team knows it. Seahawk fans have become a competitive advantage for how the Seahawks do business.

But What About Businesses Outside Football? Seldom do we see this kind of advantage in the traditional business world.

Yes, customers are what keep a company in business, but seldom can you find an example where customers actually cause the competition to fail.

For each visiting team, their goal is to have more points on the scoreboard at the end of the game than the Seahawks. It’s a clearly defined goal that can be prepared for, with obstacles adjusted for—namely the Seahawks themselves.

You can train and plan for the Seattle players, coaches and their playbook. You can go back to tape, and review past Seahawks’ behavior to anticipate future behavior.

In a similar business setting, this is like doing market analysis and competitive analysis on your competitors’ products, services and employees. You prepare your campaigns to outmaneuver, outsell and out-market your competitor.

Then, you execute your business plan, marketing plan, technology-development plan and all the other plans that make a business successful. You then run your plans, adjusting to changes, both good and bad.

But when it comes to Seahawks customers—the fans—an entirely new set of conditions are introduced that you can’t plan for: Seahawks fans will do everything in their power to prevent Green Bay from realizing their goals. They’ll shout, scream, cheer and do everything in their power.

But There Are Rules That Must Be Followed The rules bring an additional wrinkle to the unique conditions of an NFL football game.

The rules say the use of technology must be equal during a game. If one team has access to technology, the visiting team must have equal access.

For example, let’s say lightning were to strike the visitors’ bench section and short out the headsets that allow the coaches to communicate with players and other coaches. The other team would be required to remove their headsets to keep the technology playing field balanced.

This rule was used by the New York Giants to initiate an investigation of whether the Seahawks were artificially enhancing the crowd noise with the stadium public address system. This type of technical advantage isn’t allowed.

After the NFL sent two investigators to monitor, they discovered what Seahawks fans already knew: It’s the fans making the difference with their enthusiastic noise, without any artificial enhancement.

Seahawks fans really are that loud.

Again, Imagine This Scenario In Business You’ve deployed NetApp storage to keep your critical data up and accessible. Then, you get a phone call telling you to take your servers offline.

“Why?” you ask the caller.

“Because your competitor is running an inferior storage technology and it just went down, so you have to take your NetApp servers down to balance the playing field.”

Of course, this is the crux of business competitiveness. It would be just plain crazy talk. But during an NFL game, it’s the reality that the home team’s IT department is faced with.

But, that doesn’t mean the Seahawks IT department has their hands tied: They have complete control over their engagement with customers. They can use technology to enhance the customer experience, which in the case of the Seahawks, translates into direct competitive advantage on the field of play, because of the fans’ ability to affect the game.

Just How Much Do They Affect The Game? The field with the most False Start penalties by a visiting team is CenturyLink field, with 130 since 2005. The NY Giants, who had complained about the noise, had a good reason to complain: they had 11 False Starts in a single game in 2005.

To put it in perspective:

The noise of a Boeing 747 at takeoff from 50 ft = 130 dB(A)

The loudest crowd recorded at a Seahawks game, 6.5 ft from the first row was 137.6 dB(A)—an official Guinness world record, set on December 2, 2013

At least those working around a 747 can anticipate the noise and use hearing protection, unlike an NFL quarterback who is trying to be heard over the noise.

And fans can expect an even more enriched experience. This year, Seattle announced the addition of “Eye of the Hawk.”

This new technology allows live video feeds from around the stadium. The fans can now have the field experience right on their mobile devices.

The Bottom Line It’s this kind of technology advancement that allows Seattle’s IT organization to bring the fans and players even closer together.

This is great news for the NFL’s loudest fans—and something that every single NFL team scheduled to play in Seattle will be dreading this year.

If you’re a member of the 12th Man Army, what’s your favorite Seahawks memory?

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Interesting stats on the false starts. That, along with difficulty calling audibles on both sides of the ball, would be the only actual advantages I can think of for crowd noise of that magnitude, other than perhaps an intangible intimidation factor. I am anxious to see exactly how the Eye of the Hawk will be received by fans. Will that many people use it? Other than the novelty of seeing the game from a different perspective, what will it add to the experience of being a fan? How will it affect ticket sales in certain areas of the stadium over others? I guess we will see this play out soon. Great article. Keep them coming!

Matthew, I’m anxious to see the reception of the Eye of the Hawk as well. As new stadiums go up around the NFL, like the new Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, WiFi access in the stadium is now expected, placing huge technology demands on the IT departments supporting the organization.

In the stadium they showed a lot more replays last year than previously but even then it is nothing like on TV. The Eye of the Hawk should be great for fans when there is a break in the game, but don’t think it will change where you will want to site overall or how you watch the live action. Not like Levi stadium they need full Wifi because fans don’t cheer and need to post pics of their stadium food during the game – 12th Man will have its focus on the field when the action is going. I don’t know how many camera angles they’ll included but for example when Bowman went down in the NFC Championship game they spared up in the stands the repeated views of his leg that live TV apparently showed but we basically sat around for several minutes with nothing to do. Now as fan while waiting for the game to get going again you’ll have something gruesome to go pull up on your phone. Wonder if it will hurt beer sales though since game breaks = beer breaks.

Michael, for instant recall of nearly every play and studio commentators, I don’t think live attendance will ever be similar. But during down time, fans now can be more informed…and like I said, screaming at the TV just never had the same impact as doing it at a live game.

Interesting article and a nice perspective on the only significant competitive advantage that NFL fans can provide to their team: noise. There seems to be something of an unspoken prejudice against Seattle among NFL commentators because of our city’s perception as a distant outpost somewhere near Siberia (despite the fact that New York to Seattle is actually 170 air miles less than New York to San Francisco), and so maybe our fans have to work a bit harder simply to be heard. Apparently, we have been!

Yes, I agree. There has been a bit of Seattle obscurity in the modern sports world. but this is certainly not new, is it? From football to rowing, Seattle has always been seen as a land of lumberjacks and coffee drinkers. Maybe now the country is seeing that they have world class sports as well.